Dude, I’m a surgical tech - my job is to stand in an OR and be a surgeon’s bitch while we’re flaying some fucker open. …and I still spend what feels like 90% of my day on Outlook -_-
I mean, the MATLAB wojak has a dent in its skull, which feels pretty accurate. There is a ton of complex, niche, and (for those within the niche) incredibly useful software in the various Toolboxes, all developed with those fat stacks of MATLAB money. But it’s all piloted with the MATLAB language, which is just one of the worst things ever for oh so very many reasons.
I’ve been using Typst. Its (mostly) open source and much simpler than LaTeX. It’s still very new though, so it doesn’t have all of LaTeX’s features, but it’s making very steady progress.
Seems a bit early to declare an end to Latex then. According to you some use cases aren’t supported. What isn’t open source about it?
Don’t get me wrong, Latex has lots of weird quirks, and you made it sound like there were a few obvious options to replace it. But Typst doesn’t look like is ready for prime time.
I wasn’t trying to imply that Typst is a replacement for LaTeX. I’m more trying to say that I’m hoping Typst (and any other typesetting alternatives that might be out there) mature enough over the next year or two to become full replacements. It just doesn’t seem to be gaining much attention because of how dominant LaTeX is.
The main part that’s not open source is their web client, which I’m fine with. There’s a number of people on GitHub that aren’t happy about it though.
I see. It’s been a while since I last used Latex in college. Back then Kylyx was still in it’s infancy and I anyway had a established workflow with Makefiles. It seemed to me back then that the steady progress in user interface of Latex tools (like Kylyx and etc.) would be enough to make it more accessible.
Just like you have great coding IDEs nowadays with AI code completion helpers, something similar could be done for Latex. Incremental compilers for Markdown allow you to see changes in real-time in some editors, would be nice to have something of the sort for Latex. With these two and a context sensitive syntax helper (Clippy, but not annoying), and you have a killer solution. And one that is backwards compatible with all the tools that have been developed for Latex in these past decades.
Man I guess I’m spoiled. We get access to the top row except SolidWorks because we license an alternative. We use the entire MS suite too though but as a supplement. I don’t use excel hardly at all because JMP is superior in every single way, except for dashboards where we use PowerBI.
I want to love Julia so much, but it’s always something. The funky handling of scope in the REPL was the latest off-putting thing for me, but maybe I should give it a try again…
If you don’t like MATLAB your probably not the correct audience. It’s for people needing to do data analysis, simulation or control and have a lot of money to pay for the libraries. The things software developers hate about it tend to be what makes it better for statistics and modelling. Math works even suggest it isn’t appropriate for making software as the sell simulink coder that turns simulink models into c++ code.
Capitalism somehow means managers know better than you how STEM work should be done. Sigh… get used to it if you want to continue.:-| Make some FOSS on the side for fun?:-)
… Not IT approved, but well… we use an MSP, and I get to be a decision maker in the company for certain things, and just do it, because well… I can, and the company keeps me around partially for the things I do with python and sql.
I would like to say Pandas should be used for much of that excel stuff, maybe even replace it, but… Microsoft has decided to bring Python capabilities into excel, so that will likely cement them in your workflow even further:
I’ve found the selling point in not needing to open excel and click around to run the script. So often people need to do like the same three things and don’t even know how to write Python, so giving them a script to drag your file onto is a step up from excel
This is one of my favorites to share. It’s a 3D engine with raytracing with no VBA scripting - all of the calculations are done internally with spreadsheet math.
Good Excel users think themselves better than a beginner. Great Excel users think themselves somewhere between Intermediate and Advanced. Excel Masters, and I know one who placed in that Excel data modeling competition, know they’re somewhere in the Intermediate to Advanced range.
Used for the right purposes, Excel is an extremely versatile and powerful piece of software. Is use it all the time for analyzing complex financial data and turning pivot tables into really nice looking reports. I can use VBA behind the scenes to change report scenarios while preserving the formatting. Excel is great for things like that.
It’s easy to get Into trouble though because eventually someone decides to keep a bunch of auxiliary – yet somehow very important – data in a spreadsheet. Before you know it, multiple people are being asked to maintain said data and then POOF! You now have a spreadsheet functioning as a database. It’s all downhill from there.
As much as I despise Microsoft and 365, Excel is like the one thing I genuinely think they deserve an incredible amount of credit for. It’s one of the most invaluable, well supported tools around.
I mean Excel specifically, not the whole suite. I don’t need PowerPoint or a word processor, I’d rather it not be included in the price at all.
Also, they’ve made OneDrive a requirement for auto-saving on 365, not sure if that’s the case for the perpetual licenses, but if so, that’s a deal breaker for me. There will never be a Microsoft account associated with my Windows machine, period.
I can’t tell if this is ironic or not, because it genuinely feels like Microsoft believes this when you look at the absolute disgrace “New” Outlook is.
For Microsoft, “Modern, sleek, streamlined” are just marketing terms for “We got lazy, made a less useful wed-based product, and you’ll have to accept it, at the same price, while we save money on development.”
Outlook really has a lot of obscure features that not many people used. I think it’s good for them to cull these less used features and later re-add them rewritten in a more supportable manner.
I also really appreciate the emoji-reactions because I don’t have to type out a response expressing that I have read and acknowledge an email, I can just give it a thumbs up and move on, and they don’t receive a whole email to read, they just see that it got a thumbs up and can move on too
The reduced feature set in the web app is either development hasn’t reached parity, or they want it to be just enough to compete with Google sheets but keep people using the windows app.
A better price of software would be several different tools. But Microsoft want to keep the features set and backwards compatibility and the users don’t want big changes so the messy mishmash it what results.
Excel is used as a app builder, a database, plotting tool, table formatting, dashboard, visual basic environment, simulation environment there’s probably many more uses. I think it was supposed to be a calculator and accountancy book combination.
If anyone knew excel (or spreadsheets in general) would become what they did they would design it completely differently. A database that links to different pieces of software would be much better. That can’t exist now, because the markets consumed by excel.
I thought I knew everything about Excel, but just last week I learned that it now has TypeScript integration for macros. I nearly wept tears of joy. Finally I can leave behind VBA.
It’s turning complete, so it’s should be able to do anything. Power point is also turning complete, but not practical. Excel is practical enough to get started then moving on to something better gets hard because people depend on those excel sheets.
we have an excel spreadsheet at my workplace that takes a solid 2 minutes to open and even longer to close and accesses a number of other spreadsheets with read/write access in the background. it’s an absolute monster.
(it’s essentially a database that keeps track of the calibration dates for our testing equipment)
Depending on what functions you have running to make it do all the things, could you have it live on Sharepoint and just access it through Excel online? That offloads a lot of the processing to MS’s servers but does have the disadvantage of being Excel Online, which has some but not all the functions of desktop Excel and the keyboard shortcuts may or may not work. Also, Excel Online doesn’t seem to love macros, which can break things.
the only reason that the spreadsheet exist is because of macros (pretty sure the table has over 10.000 lines of VBA, with more in the tables it accesses) but my bosses are thankfully investigating alternatives for a migration of the functions that that table provides.
I sadly am only a trainee at the company, so i don’t get too much input beyond fixing whatever breaks with it every so often while it’s still in use, but yeah.
my boss does appreciate what i’m doing but i just don’t have a decision power that someone working in IT would have (i work in the physics/chemistry lab). thanks though, i appreciate the sentiment :)
There are numerous reports and databases we work with from other platforms, and for nearly all of them, I just end up feeding it to Excel so I can manage it the way I like. So many of those platforms just have absolute dog shit UIs or refuse to present data in a configurable way, or straight up hide certain things for no reason.
Part of my Monday morning routine is actually exporting a CSV for a couple things that can’t be connected directly to excel, hitting Get Data, and letting my custom workbooks do their thing. Watching it all update and present itself in exactly the way I want to see it is so god damn satisfying.
there are definitely reasons to use excel but in my case there is a defined and expected workflow and using excel just makes it unnecessarily slow and error-prone. at this point, the worksheet breaks at least once every 3 months and i’m the one who gets to fix it because i read myself into the worksheet’s script and the guy who originally created it doesn’t work for us anymore.
the code is (thankfully) well enough commented that additional documentation is not necessary to understand it, so reading yourself into it is thankfully easy enough as long as you know VBA.
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